Every fortnight the Croud SEO team collate the latest news from relevant sources around the web so you don’t have to. Read through the top SEO news stories for this week below and follow us on Twitter or sign up to our newsletter.
Learn more about what you see on Google Images
08/07/2020
Google announced it has launched a new Google Image search feature on US mobile search, providing “quick facts” about the images being presented in a knowledge panel. This may have increased traffic through Google Image search, indicating content is being displayed in the panels.
Is it time for Google Scotland?
07/07/2020
Something the pandemic has highlighted is the difference in governance between the countries within the United Kingdom, in particular Scotland and England, the former of which relaxed lockdown rules later than the other. On Google Search, however, the SERPs displayed the lockdown rules for England, as the English parliament is known as the UK parliament. SEL discusses how Google may may be failing to provide regionally specific results, and not just for lockdown related searches, but for wider queries also.
The Rich Results Test is out of beta
07/07/2020
Google has announced that its’ Rich Results Test tool is out of beta, which now fully supports all Google Search rich result features. The older Structured Data Testing Tool will be removed some time in the future, but will remain for the time being.
Regular expression filter support coming to Google Search Console performance reports
06/07/2020
This is something that will make data analysts jump with joy; a regex filter is coming to Search Console reports! Among other things, this will make filtering by multiple pages/queries in the performance reports possible, using the same syntax as in Google Analytics.
The pillars of successful link building
01/07/2020
SEL discusses the principles of creating a successful link building campaign. This includes creating audience-focused, linkable assets, identifying relevant, valued and trusted sites for links, getting creative with link building outreach and developing a relationship with the linking site.
Mobile voice usage trends in 2020
30/06/2020
A survey by Perficient has found that voice search usage has plateaued, with voice devices such as smart speakers being widely adopted but failing to revolutionise the industry. Currently, users that use voice search to ask queries were in fourth position, with manually entering the text still the most popular method; 56% of users either never use voice search or use it less that twice per week.
Bing’s search ranking factors
30/06/2020
Bing has recently updated its Webmaster Guidelines, which details what factors the search engine uses to rank web pages; relevance, quality and credibility, user engagement, freshness, location and page load time.
TripAdvisor, Yelp and others highlight venue safety, an emerging consumer decision factor
Review sites are indicating that an emerging factor for consumer purchases is venue safety, which is likely to remain a key factor for the foreseeable future. Brands with a physical presence need to highlight clearly, on both website and in store, the measures taken to ensure customer and employee safety, to help improve customer purchase rates.
Google tests showing Analytics data in Search Console with ‘Insights’
29/06/2020
Google appears to be testing a new feature within Search Console called Insights, which pulls in data from Google Analytics. This includes metrics such as overall page views, overall average time spent on the site, social media traffic, newest and top referring links and much more.
